“Why did you leave with me? What made things different? Karp still has that tape.”
Tammy laughed, and it was one of the saddest sounds I had ever heard. “You have no idea what you’re like, do you? There I was, floating in this loft like… like a goddamn orange bobbing in space, tethered to nothing, no up, no down, no idea how I got there, no air to breathe, no way home, everything so unreal I wondered if I even existed, and you walked through the door. You’re like concrete. Completely real. Even just standing there, before you said anything, you made everything else reaclass="underline" the walls, the floors, what he’d done to me.”
Me, real. It was my turn to laugh, but it didn’t sound sad, and now that I’d started I couldn’t seem to stop.
You’re frightening her, Julia observed.
“I know,” I said. “Dornan was wrong. I think maybe I’ll go mad after all.”
Tammy sat back on her heels, and I suddenly saw her as she must have looked when she was thirteen, with new breasts, and the realization that she was never going to be allowed to do things boys did, never just be herself, and I was filled with a horrible, insidious tenderness. She was fighting hard. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have any of the tools.
“What do you mean about Dornan?” she said.
“What? Oh. He told me I wouldn’t go mad with grief, that I’m too stubborn.”
“Grief?”
I stared at her. How could she not know? “Julia,” I said carefully.
She took the kind of short breath people do when they remember something they know they shouldn’t have forgotten. But it had been back in May, and I had only been her fiancé’s friend who didn’t like her, and then I’d just disappeared, and so much had happened to her since then that it wasn’t surprising. Except, of course, it was.
“Don’t.” I held up my hand. “Don’t apologize.”
She didn’t. She just studied my face for a while, then rocked back on her heels and up onto her feet, and walked into the trailer. She came back with a fresh beer for me.
I felt tired and sick and didn’t really want it.
Let the woman apologize. Take the beer, Julia said, and for the first time, I wished she would go away. I tried to call the wish back, but it was too late. She disappeared.
“Aud?”
I shook my head, and accepted the beer. I took one swallow and set it aside. “Dornan,” I said. “What are you going to do about that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it.”
“Sure.” Her eyes cut sideways, the way a street dealer’s would if you rousted him on the street with a dime bag in his pocket.
“I mean think about it now. At some point you’re going to have to face him, face yourself. At some point you’ll have to leave here.”
“Oh, right. I’ll just leave, go back to Atlanta, and pick up where I left off. No problem. Only I can’t. Not while that prick is out there with that tape. He could send it to anyone, anytime. He could already have sent it to Dornan. All he has to do is threaten to do that, to make me do anything he wants.”
“Only if you let him. If you call Dornan, tell him everything, Karp has no power over you.”
“Could you do that?” Her voice was intense. “Could you have picked up the phone and told your girlfriend, ‘Sorry, honey, yes that’s me screwing some guy, but why don’t we pretend it didn’t happen? Why don’t you just never, ever let it cross your mind again?’ ”
I wanted to smash her lush, filthy mouth with my bottle.
She changed tack. “I have some money. I could give it to you, if you helped me, if you fixed him for me. Geordie.”
It was an effort to speak politely. “I’m not in the revenge business.” But I remembered what I had done after Julia’s death.
“Please, Aud.”
“No.” If I hit her I wouldn’t feel any better. I breathed as evenly as I could. “We could both do with some food.”
This time we ate inside, and neither of us spoke.
I woke when Tammy slid naked into my bed. It felt good, her mouth at my throat, her hand on my breast then my stomach then my thigh, and my breath went ragged, the muscles in my belly tight, and I got hot and swollen and wet, before I realized what was happening and held her away from me.
“Please, Aud. I need this. Please, please. I need someone to hold, someone.” And her waist was so warm and soft under my arm, her thigh so smooth, and it had been so long I wanted to let her.
She kissed my cheek. “I saw you looking at me tonight, the way your eyes followed me. Here.” She took my right hand, put it on her breast, where the nipple puckered and tightened under my palm, and despite myself I groaned. “Yes, you want me, don’t you?” and she rolled on top of me, belly against my vulva, face between my breasts, “Oh, yes, come on, come on,” and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to just give in, push myself wet and slick against the warm rounded skin, I wanted to, but I heaved her off and raised myself up on one elbow. It took a moment of groping to find the light switch.
She lay on her back, hair tousled, cheeks touched with sharp red. Her eyes glittered. “Turn it off.” Her voice quavered. “What’s the matter? What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Is it because you don’t like me? Not even enough to fuck? How hard would it be, Aud? A half hour of your life. Is it so much to ask?” Short, angry movements as she wiped her cheeks with her hands.
I wanted to turn to her, cradle her head against my shoulder, let her feel her tears dropping on another human being’s skin, not a sheet, but I knew if my body came close enough to touch hers I might not be able to stop a second time. “It’s not me you want.”
“Everyone is always telling me what I want! Like my own opinion doesn’t count!” She grabbed my hand, thrust it between her legs. “There, does that feel like I don’t want you? Does it? Does it matter, does it really matter what else is real except that we could have sex here, just two people, giving each other back something good? But it does to you.” She thrust my hand away. My fingers were wet and sticky. The small trailer was thick with the smell of sex. “Well, maybe you’re right, maybe I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last person on earth, except that I want something. That’s what you think, isn’t it? Well, I do want something. I want you to get that man for me. Fix him. That’s something you’re good at, isn’t it? Hurting people. It would be easy for you. Fix him. Oh god, Aud, please! Get the tape. Please.”
“He won’t use the tape now.” I didn’t know why my voice didn’t shake, didn’t know how I kept it so flat, why I didn’t just kiss her and tear her apart. “Think about it. There’s no point. It was to control you, but you’ve already left. He doesn’t sound like the type to waste time on a lost cause. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about.” Her voice was thick with anger. “You have no fucking idea, do you? Look at you. You’ve always done what you want, got what you want—you just reach out and take it. You have no fucking idea. You’ve never been paralyzed with fear, never had to wonder if you did the right thing, or wish you were different. Always so self-confident, so fucking controlled. You have no idea even what it’s like to make a mistake.”
I had made bigger mistakes than this woman even knew existed. To her a mistake was something that made you feel bad, something embarrassing on tape. My mistakes had led to that white room, to those machines, that dead husk. Tammy’s mistakes were her own. Mine had dug a hole in two lives and annihilated a third. And here Tammy lay, so smug in her assumptions, still healthy, still breathing, still alive.